“What do you mean by ’perfectly safe’,” he inquired rather coldly.

“Why, that Sadie Burch could never make you pay her the legacy—­because it isn’t a legal legacy.  You can safely keep it.  It’s yours, legally and morally.”

“Well, is it?” asked Payson slowly.  “Morally, isn’t it my duty to pay over the money, no matter who she is?”

Tutt, who had tilted backward in his swivel chair, brought both his feet to the floor with a bang.

“Of course it isn’t!” he cried.  “You’d be crazy to pay the slightest attention to any such vague and unexplained scrawl.  Listen, young man!  In the first place you haven’t any idea when your father wrote that paper—­except that it was at least seven years ago.  He may have changed his mind a dozen times since he wrote it.  It may have been a mere passing whim or fancy, done in a moment of weakness or emotion or temporary irrationality.  Indeed, it may have been made under duress.  Nobody but a lawyer who has the most intimate knowledge of his clients’ daily life and affairs has the remotest suspicion of—­Oh, well, we won’t go into that!  But, the first proposition is that in no event is it possible for you to say that the request in that letter was the actual wish of your father at the time of his death.  All you can say is that at some time or other it may have been his wish.”

“I see!” agreed Payson.  “Well, what other points are there?”

“Secondly,” continued Tutt, “it must be presumed that if your father took the trouble to retain a lawyer to have his will properly drawn and executed he must have known first, that it was necessary to do so in order to have his wishes carried out, and second, that no wish not properly incorporated in the will itself could have any legal effect.  In other words, inferentially, he knew that this paper had no force and therefore it must be assumed that if he made it that way he intended that it should have no legal effect and did not intend that it should be carried out.  Get me?”

“Why, yes, I think I do.  Your point is that if a man knows the law and does a thing so it has no legal effect he should be assumed to intend that it have no legal effect.”

“Exactly,” Tutt nodded with satisfaction.  “The law is wise, based on generations of experience.  It realizes the uncertainties, vagaries, and vacillations of the human mind—­and the opportunities afforded to designing people to take advantage of the momentary weaknesses of others—­and hence to prevent fraud and insure that only the actual final wishes of a man shall be carried out it requires that those wishes shall be expressed in a particular, definite and formal way—­in writing, signed and published before witnesses.”

“You certainly make it very clear!” assented Payson.  “What do executors usually do under such circumstances?”